SAN ANGELO, Texas - It says much about the state of American politics today that a special election victory that gave a party 41 Senate seats out of 100 instead of 40 has that party dancing in the streets.

Granted, Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts last week was impressive. More than that, it was stunning — a Republican taking Ted Kennedy’s seat was as unlikely as a Democrat replacing, say, Strom Thurmond.

And while Democrat Martha Coakley apparently ran a lackluster and uninspired campaign, no reasonable analyst can say the result wasn’t at least in part a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency, but also on the repulsive deal-making that goes on in Washington, which Democrats might not have invented but over which they now preside.

In that regard, Brown’s victory wasn’t only a win for the Republicans, but also an omen for this fall’s congressional elections. The 2010 election lineup already favored Republicans, but now they look even stronger.

For now, though, the attention is on Brown, a former state senator who all but a relative handful of Americans had never heard of before last week. And, from this vantage point 1,800 miles away, it seems warranted.

First, let’s get straight that Brown won’t be elected president no matter how pleased Republicans are today with his victory. The reality is that taking the political positions that allow a Republican to get elected statewide in Massachusetts disqualifies that politician from winning the GOP nomination.

It’s why former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney didn’t win the 2008 nomination even though he tried to renounce his positions on issues like gays and abortion. The same political reality doomed former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani even though the national press inexplicably anointed him until voters proved the inevitable.

That said, Brown did everything right. As an example, when he was asked in a debate whether he could sit in Ted Kennedy’s seat and vote against health care, Brown replied, “Well, with all due respect it’s not the Kennedys’ seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”

It was the perfect answer — assertive without being offensive.

After the election, I learned that Brown had driven around the state campaigning in his pickup truck. Not only had I never thought about people in Massachusetts driving pickups, if I had, I’d never imagine that could have won any election points there.

We learned in 1996 that can be a wonderful political plus in Texas when Victor Morales, a schoolteacher, won the Democratic nomination for senator in large part because his pickup caught voters’ fancy.

Granted, Texas is a lot bigger than Massachusetts and voters here are more susceptible to a pickup platform plank, but apparently that’s a universal political attraction, and ambitious prospective pols across the nation might now be shopping for a truck that will have 200,000 miles on it by the time they start running for office.

But what about now? What happens over the next 11 months before a new Congress convenes? It will take people who are smarter than I am to figure it out.

Presumably the effort to reform health care will continue. The Democrats have invested too much, and the issue is too important to let it die.

Brown is the latest in the short line of senators who hold extraordinary power over health care legislation. He can kill it, but then his identity would be the senator who buried health care.

That would be political gold in some states, but not necessarily in Massachusetts. While that state already has something close to universal health care and some voters wondered why they should help pay other states’ way toward that goal, that probably isn’t a distinction the majority of Massachusetts voters want their senator to have.

So Brown may feel pressure to help shape a bill that can get to the president’s desk. If he is as astute as he has shown so far, he won’t extort a bounty for his state — and then will make sure his constituents know he didn’t.

(Hopefully others have learned a lesson. Deal-making always will be a part of winning lawmakers’ votes, but there are limits — and paying for Nebraska’s Medicaid until the end of time should have been an obvious over-the-line bit of bribery.)

If Brown doesn’t make his mark on health care or some other high-profile issue, he will wind up as a large asterisk in U.S. political history. That’s because he will lose in 2012, because that’s the natural order of things unless he can change it.

In the meantime, it will be fun if the natural order of things for political candidates becomes driving pickups across their states as they ask for votes.